Following in the footsteps of Coco Chanel, Catherine Deneuve, Nicole Kidman and Audrey Tautou, Brad Pitt is the new face of Chanel’s iconic fragrance.

The French luxury brand’s new ad, filmed by Atonement director Joe Wright, is the first time a man has starred as the face of the famous Chanel perfume.

In the new video available on the Chanel site, Brad Pitt, lit in moody black and white against a mottled wall, talks directly to the camera: “it is not a journey, every journey ends, but we go on,” Pitt explains, as if speaking to an unseen woman.

“The world turns and we turn with it,” he intones, as the camera moves to a picture of the earth as seen from space, a bottle of Chanel No. 5 superimposed on top of it.

With a new brand tagline of “inevitable”, the choice of Brad Pitt as the face of the brand was “obvious”, according to Chanel, as soon as the company had decided that it would be a male face promoting the celebrated scent, created by Russian-French perfumier Ernest Beaux for Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel in 1921.

The last Chanel No. 5 film was directed by Amélie creator Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who teamed up with his former leading lady Audrey Tautou for a retro extravaganza set on the Orient Express. The same year, Tautou starred as Miss Chanel in the feature film Coco Before Chanel.

Brad Pitt is joined by two female co-stars in this second commercial for the French fashion house’s signature fragrance.